Ted Conover, author of several books including Newjack and Rolling Nowhere, spans the world in The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today, his study of six crucial roads in Peru, East Africa, the West Bank, India, China, and Nigeria. In the excerpt below, Conover, who visits Zócalo on March 15, considers the history of speed — from the first teenage driver Phaeton to the first woman to drive the Indy 500 to his own four-hour teenage trek through Colorado in his dad’s Porsche to meet a girl.

Bollywood posters have done for Mumbai what the movies done for the film world — dotted the landscape with sharp color and lurid drama. And like the flicks, the posters, particularly the hand-painted variety, are becoming relics in the digital age. For decades, beginning in the 1930s